


Putting Away The Puzzles

by HostisHumaniGeneris



Category: Hellbound Heart - Clive Barker
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Slice of Life, Trick or Treat: Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-14 15:24:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16043213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/pseuds/HostisHumaniGeneris
Summary: Its been years since the day at the house on Lodovico Street.  Kirsty will always be carrying around the memories of what happened there, and who it happened to.  However, she has done her best to move on, finding some lucky that she had been missing out on for years.  So what if she leads a boring life?  She knows quite well what the pursuit of new forms of excitement leads to.





	Putting Away The Puzzles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/gifts).



Kirsty sat in the chair, watching the rain come down, pattering against the window, while she held a steaming cup of tea.  She took a sip and huddled up in her blanket, watching the patterns of water droplets snaking their way down the window, occasionally accompanied by a flash of light and drumroll of thunder.

Tom asked her if bad dreams were what kept her up, and she related that no, she always had this problem.  That was a half-truth; she did have difficulty sleeping, relinquishing her worrying consciousness for eight hours.  But also she did have bad dreams, ever since four years ago.

She had been lucky, the box was not in her possession for very long.  Somehow, someone learned she had it, and learned where she was and offered to buy it.  Kirsty had told the man what she had pieced together, that the box was worth nothing but suffering.  But she had gotten rid of it, glad to be rid of the lacquered cube.  She’d never, _never_ been tempted to solve the box again, but still, she was glad it was out of her hands.  Her attempts to burn and bury it ended with it coming back to her, distant ringing of bells finding her ears.

Part of her felt guilty for letting go of the box, letting someone else figure out the trick to disassembling it and inviting the Cenobites to take them. However, the man was quite insistent, bordering on threatening when she tried to warn him away. Sometimes she felt bad when she said he wanted it and would've hurt her to get it, other times she didn't. She didn't know how he found her, however she felt that the box _wanted_ to be known, to be coveted. She wanted nothing to do with it, so it wanted nothing to do with her. Maybe she was just anthromorphizing.

Since the day she became acquainted with the Cenobites, she spent a year wallowing in misery and self-pity.  Rory was gone, Julia was gone.  The police’s commentary on them was a firm “no comment”.  And somehow she escaped the search, she was never questioned her about it; the jealous third in a love triangle, the woman admitted psychiatrically right before the disappearances.  Maybe it was part of the deal with the Cenobites; a job well done in returning their property meant they pulled strings.  Maybe she was just reading too much into it.  Kirsty was a boring woman who couldn't possibly have done all that had been done on Ludovico Street.

Finding Rory—if Hell existed, she could take a little comfort that paradise did, too.  So she rationalized, and so she managed to get by feeling sad and scared of the little black box.  In retrospect, when she finally got rid of the box things started to look up.  She managed to move on.

She still grieved Rory, and on especially charitable days, even Julia.  She'd learned a long time ago to accept a lot as out of her control, and just coasting--but while she still accepted all the ways she couldn't change her life, maybe she had a little more perspective on things she could change her life.  She had thought she never would find another man quite like Rory, and so had never tried.  And Tom was not Rory, not by a longshot.  But he was funny, enough to make her giggle until she hurt, and nice enough to apologize for that, and she slowly fell for him.

She downplayed it at first.  Going out for dinner with a friend wasn’t a date, even if he was unmarried, her age, and eventually lead to more than dinner.  Celebrating their six and twelve-month anniversaries from the day they met was innocuous.  Moving in together was to split costs.

She had fallen Tom.  Not in the same way she had for Rory, but she had fallen all the same.  Rory had… been forbidden fruit, even without the idea of finding him again.  Rory was kind and nice, and looked past her to find Julia.  Julia who fed him to Frank.  Rory had broken her heart completely innocently--she couldn't change that he'd picked Julia, but just coasted by in their wake.  Tom helped her piece it back together, scratched and dented as it was.

Moving on was painful, but necessary.  On occasion, she still passed by Lodovico Street, but trained herself to walk past, first looking at the house without looking at the window that had the blinds; then to ignoring the house itself.  She used puzzles to occupy her time, but found herself resisting the urge to draw in a crossword for longer periods. She lived a boring life.  She acknowledged it, and a few friends commented as well.  She was regimented, cautious, diligent and still somehow disorganized and a little spacey.  Still, she helped bring order to the chaos that was Tom's homelife, and he helped give her something to do that wasn’t thinking about Rory or the box. Not thinking about those topics was becoming easier and easier, occasional nightmare notwithstanding.

They had asked her didn’t ever want to do something exciting, experience something new?

No, no she did not. Maybe it was going a little too far, but she'd figured out what could happen if you always sought _more_. She wasn't going to let happiness slip through her fingers and drift along again, but she also had no need to chase novelty, adventure, blinding passion, whatever it was.

If there was boredom in the life she led, it was a safe kind of boredom. 

**Author's Note:**

> You mentioned in your request you wanted Kirsty to move on and have a happy and fulfilling life, and I hope I delivered--it seemed fitting to me that, given how Frank's pursuit of sensation and Julia's desire for passion fueled what happened to them, a stable relationship for Kirsty fit.


End file.
